The election of Donald Trump as the President of the United States has posed a major challenge to the Atlantic Alliance and the post-World War II international order. A Europe used to the special bonding of an Atlantic Alliance has been buffeted by Trump’s preference for a robust unilateralist foreign and trade policy. India, more distant from the US, has perceived some geopolitical benefits in Trump’s unorthodox ways in regard to China. But the weakening of the US-Europe relationship, along with upheavals like Britain’s vote to leave the European Union, has meant that India and the European Union have come much closer together in the past five years on a number of policy issues integral to the international order. This trend was already evident before either Trump or Brexit, but American external polices have accelerated the coming together of India and the EU.
Views of the World Order
Neither India nor the EU Member States were pleased with the Trump Administration’s unilateralism and hostility to the international order’s three primary components: multilateral institutions, the postwar military alliance structure and their legitimizing values (International Institute of Strategic Studies 2018). But they had significant differences over which of the American President’s actions was more objectionable and the reasons why they disliked these actions. New Delhi’s relationship with Washington had far less depth and background than the Atlantic Alliance and there was thus less for Trump to disrupt in terms of bilateral ties. Moreover, common values were seen by the Europeans as the unique element of their bond with the Americans and values were almost completely missing in the US President’s pronouncements and policy. In the India-US relationship, values were largely a rhetorical exercise as far as New Delhi was concerned.
That India is less invested in preserving the postwar international order is in large part because it has been a marginal player in that order for most of India’s independent history. It initially rejected key economic elements of that order and broadly saw its own economic and political development best accomplished by minimizing international interaction. While this has changed significantly since the opening up of the economy and the end of the Cold War between 1989 and 1991, New Delhi continues to engage with the international system cautiously (Kliman and Fontaine 2012).
India is far more sanguine about Trump’s attempts to delegitimize the international system, so long as they do not go beyond a certain point, for two reasons. One, India sees the decision-making bodies of the international system as weighted against its own representation, whether the United Nations Security Council or bodies like the Nuclear Suppliers Group. Trump-style attacks are therefore seen as useful in shaking up the status quo. Two, lndia supports a soft balance of power structure in the Indo-Pacific region as necessary to put limits on Chinese geopolitical assertiveness. The present international order is seen as incapable of doing so, in part because China sits at the high table of most multilateral bodies and there is nothing like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in the western Pacific (Rajagopalan 2017; Paul 2018). The European Union is seen as having negligible levers of influence in the Indo-Pacific and no willingness to use the few levers, almost all economic, it has against China. Trump’s China policy has proven to be remarkably forceful with its sweeping imposition of tariffs and barriers on technology.
Two elements of the international order—climate and maritime security—have seen the maximum amount of India-EU cooperation. In the case of climate change, this was greatly enhanced following the Trump Administration’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Both in terms of the EU and with individual European countries, there has been considerable cooperation on the climate front (Khandekar 2018). India has also raised existing maritime security cooperation with France and Britain, and has even had its first naval actions with French warships flying the EU flag. However, there has been a minimal degree of overlap on the issue of trade and almost none in the area of nuclear non-proliferation, though both multilateral systems have been deliberately targeted by Trump. New Delhi and Brussels have sought to uphold the sanctity of the World Trade Organization (WTO) against unilateral American trade actions. However, India is a minor player in global trade and among the more protectionist WTO members. Many of Trump’s grouses against India are also shared by the European Union (Peterson Institute for International Economics 2003).
New Delhi has been indifferent to the fate of NATO, a key target of Trump’s ire and a major source of concern for the EU. The one overseas military operation that Trump wants to wind up which worries India—the US military action in Afghanistan—is a war most Europeans also believe should come to an end. The nascent military arrangements India has invested in, whether the India-US-Japan trilateral or the Quad, are all about the Indo-Pacific, where India sees the EU is seen as having little or no role. The Trump Administration has remained fully supportive of these efforts, if anything seeing India as the less aggressive participant in all three.
New Delhi and Brussels have both opposed the American abrogation of the nuclear agreement with Iran and the subsequent imposition of US sanctions. India lacks the economic wherewithal to defy the United States on the sanctions and so has largely acquiesced, preferring to negotiate temporary exemptions directly with Washington. European attempts to set up parallel financial mechanisms to get around the US sanctions were supported by India but proved abortive. The two sides were on the same side but lacked the capability to do much about the US’s actions (Emmott et al. 2019, 9 May).
On Trump’s decision to cancel the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty, however, India and the EU were not on the same page. New Delhi saw the INF Treaty through the prism of China and the fact the treaty had allowed China a near monopoly in missiles of that range in the western Pacific. Brussels saw it in terms of a breakdown of the post-Cold War consensus on non-proliferation and destabilizing to their region. India, a long-standing former sufferer of multilateral nuclear technology sanctions, is generally cynical about the multilateral non-proliferation and arms control regime.
Where the EU and India differ the most is the importance they place on the ‘liberal’ prefix that is sometimes attached to ‘international order’. Arguably, nothing distinguishes the Atlantic Alliance from similar arrangements in the world more than the commonality of the United States and the Union when it comes to values. This is a much weaker element even with the five treaty alliances of the United States in the Indo-Pacific. Constitutional democracy is well entrenched in the Indian polity today but India remains ambivalent about liberalism and all that it entails, both at home and abroad. Indian attitudes regarding liberalism are an ever-changing landscape though present trendlines show Indians becoming more liberal in their economic views but less tolerant on social issues (Meinardus 2019). Being ambivalent about the universal applications of liberal democracy is one reason India does not support its export. Privately, most Indian commentators will argue democracy is alien to the cultures of both China and the Arab world. Therefore, the question of exporting democracy to elsewhere has never been part of India’s foreign policy. New Delhi prefers to emphasize that the world order should be ‘rules-based’ but not necessarily that it be ‘democratic’ at the nation-state level (Muni 2009; Press Trust of India 2019). While the Union was as enthusiastic about democracy promotion as the United States in the aftermath of the Cold War, that sentiment in Brussels has waned as other issues have assumed priority and interventions in places like Libya have turned sour. Trump’s enthusiasm for dictators and right-wing populists has shocked Europeans but has been treated with indifference by Indians.
The international order has many elements and the Trump Administration has wielded at least a verbal axe on most of its foundations. India and the EU agree on the importance of only some of the pillars of that order, but this has been enough to accelerate cooperation between the two. India will seek ‘coalitions of the willing’, say senior Indian diplomats, to rally around specific pillars of the international order.1 Another reason for limited India-EU cooperation is continuing uncertainty by both sides whether Trump’s policy will necessarily remain US policy after his presidency is over. Even the mercurial US President’s views on the world, as discussed below, have changed over the years.
Campaign Views
On the campaign trail through 2016, Trump laid out a worldview that ran counter to the prevailing foreign policy consensus in Washington and the major Western capitals. He made three major overlapping claims that positioned him even outside the mainstream of his own Republican Party. As one of his early political backers explained after Trump’s inaugural address and its America First theme, ‘Trump is repudiating the establishment consensus. He is part of neither its rightwing nor its leftwing’ (Gingrich 2016).
Firstly, he expressed a preference for unilateral foreign policy action in the context of an extremely narrow view of the national interest, labelled as ‘America First’. While a belief in unilateralism is widespread among conservative American politicians, in Trump’s case it encompassed a repudiation of almost all US bilateral and multilateral commitments, including those in trade, defence and immigration and even bodies that the United States had itself created.
Secondly, Trump claimed that American allies were exploiting the United States by not shouldering their fair share of the costs of the alliance. Unprecedented for a postwar US President, Trump expressed scepticism about the utility of even NATO. He even remarked that the European Union was created to take advantage of the US.
Thirdly, Trump espoused a crude version of mercantilism which saw US trade deficits as signs of America’s wealth leaking out to other countries. He was critical of almost all multilateral trading arrangements as being biased against the United States. Trump’s worldview was a throwback to a nineteenth-century American conservativism and consistent with his own statements going back to the 1980s (The Economist 2016, 9 November; Sanger and Haberman 2016; Wright 2016). In other words, unlike other postwar American presidents, Trump did not believe ‘a world of expanding democracy and free markets’ was in American interests and did not believe that the relatively low costs of the American alliance structure and investments in international institutions constituted a geopolitical ‘bargain’ (Kahl and Brands 2017).
Symbolic Acts
During his first year in office, President Trump acted on some of his promises, but in a manner that seemed to indicate he was mostly interested in symbolic victories. The most striking action was on trade policy. Right after his inauguration, Trump withdrew from the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Four months later, he initiated a review of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Trump maintained an unrelenting criticism, in speeches and on social media, of the trade surpluses of a number of countries, including China and Germany, were running with the United States. None of this caused too much alarm. The Trans-Pac...